Hi, I’m Scared

When I was a child in the 1970s, people would constantly quote a line from Frank Herbert’s science fiction opus Dune: “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.”

At the time, I just thought it was an annoying adult affectation, like drinking wine and complaining about relationships. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand what the heck old Herbert was on about.

I think a lot about fear. There is the big stuff — things like climate change, the erosion of democracy and the return of nuclear war. All of which are currently on the table, it seems. There is also the small stuff, like the dentist, falling off a tall building and murder hornets. Mostly, I think about how much fear shapes and controls how we humans live.

The moment we’re living in could be accurately described as “world on fire.” Rage coupled with fear have become the predominant tools to make people do things or not do things. The rampages of political bullies have become ubiquitous of late, with leaders competing to see who can behave most abominably. So, add in fear of other humans, especially those who have access to nuclear weapons and are acting without any shame or morality, and you have a recipe for supra-anxiety, stoked and coaxed into constant alarm. Current events are such that a paralytic state is a perfectly reasonable reaction.

But there are worse things than being afraid.

In the face of fear’s “total obliteration,” is there a way to fight off one’s own chicken-shittiness and conquer terror?

I have tested a few theories.

Nothing to fear but fear itself. Right? Wrong!

Recently, I had a run of things that caused me unshakeable dread. A public speaking event, a dentist visit and a major financial undertaking were lined up one after another like box cars of scariness in a train bound for hell. These might seem pipsqueak-ish beside the possibility of nuclear annihilation, but it’s all relative.

Sometimes it helps to do an assessment along the lines of “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Well, you could say something stupid, pee your pants in public and then fall off a tall building into a mushroom cloud. But in all likelihood, only a couple of those things will probably happen.

So, let’s begin with big terrors and work our way down to slightly more manageable things.

For starters: Is the Third World War about to break out?

The short answer is maybe. But also, keep it in perspective.

What’s the very worst thing that could ever happen? That’s easy. It’s the big kahuna: you, me and everyone we ever knew will all die. Even if nukes or climate catastrophe doesn’t get us first, at some point, the sun will blink out and the planet itself will turn to ash and ice or a combination of the two.

Whenever I feel overwhelmed by the state of current events, I think about dinosaurs. There have been many other ages than this, and another timeframe is on its way even now. We had our moment. Bring on the rise of some other species. Like the naked mole rat or lampreys. Or even better, please bring back the dinosaurs. Thanks, God!

Fear of death

At the bottom of it all, beneath every other mundane anxiety, lurks the fear of death. There is no escape. It may be sooner or it may be later, but no one here gets out alive. You would think this shared experience with all living things would make for greater compassion, but you’d be wrong.

The funny part is that at a certain point, death doesn’t seem so bad. If you’re dead, at least you won’t have to worry about public speaking events or dentist visits. It will all be over — all the fretting, the endless anxiety. All quiet on every front. One of the privileges of being alive is the privilege of dreading things, of getting through them and then dreading some more and different things.

If you’re operating from the baseline of death as the ultimate thing to fear, other terrors may become strangely more manageable.

Fear of fighting

Like most conflict-averse people, I will run a kilometre rather than fight. But sometimes, you gotta fight.

At the height of the Ottawa occupation, after the truckers had been allowed to set up camp in the centre of the city and abuse the residents for weeks on end, it was hard, nay impossible, not to wonder why someone hadn’t put a stop to it. The police cited fear of escalation, but it often appeared to be something as simple as fear of a fight.

Amanda Marcotte’s recent essay in Salon laid out what happens when people push back.

As she sensibly writes: “There’s a lesson in this for those who want to oppose rising authoritarianism: Don’t be scared of these people. Most of them are paper tigers, who will fold if they are confronted with the threat of a real consequence.”

The truckers’ bloviating seems almost quaint now, in light of even worse stuff that has rolled onto the international scene. The same lessons apply. When authoritarianism raises its snarling face, real courage also shows up, shining like a beacon in the dark. In the wake of Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine, ordinary citizens picked up guns to face an invading army with courage and grim humour. It was a powerful scene that reminded me of how much fear stands in the way of meaningful action. When you finally turn and face the bully, it actually feels better.

Speaking in public

Fear of speaking in public ranks up there in the top slots of terror. You can try and avoid it forever, but at some point, you’re probably going to have to do it. So just get through it.

I spent weeks dreading a public speaking event that I committed to in a moment of out-of-body lunacy. The subject was something I only had the vaguest notion about, whereas the other people involved were experts in their fields.

As the day of the event drew closer, dread began to build upon itself, growing monstrous and metastatic. I started to pray for a natural disaster to occur. Please God, anything really, a power outage would be great. Maybe a tsunami? Not a huge one, just sufficient to disrupt business as usual. A minor medical emergency perhaps, like appendicitis — only a minor hurdle that I’d already had an appendectomy.

In the end, there was no escape. There was only getting through it. Turns out that panic is a great motivator, able to sear information into your brain like white-hot iron. Fear-inspired preparation, by which I mean over-preparation, is the most effective tool to combat fraidy-cat stuff.

The other upside is the pure unbridled bliss of having it over. The lightness, the freedom, the anvil of dread simply gone. It was almost worth the agony of going through it in the first place. Almost.

Fear of looking silly

The fear of looking foolish is connected to the fear of speaking in public. What if you get up there, open your mouth and reveal to the world that you are a giant bonehead? There are plenty of boneheads who have done perfectly well for themselves.

Sometimes cluelessness can be quite sweet, charming even. There’s an entire canon of film dedicated to the triumph of ignorance, but perhaps the most telling of these is the late great Hal Ashby’s film Being There, starring Peter Sellers as a man so blissfully vacant that he is mistaken for a genius.

So the next time you worry about putting your foot in your mouth, just stuff it all in there and say the silliest thing that you can think of. In all likelihood, no one will notice.

And maybe they’ll think you’re being obscure or deep.

Pee-pants humiliation

I know this is ridiculous, but I have long had a fear of peeing my pants in public. Maybe it stems from a long-buried childhood moment that I don’t fully recall, but it’s real and paralyzing. A funny thing changed this and by funny, I mean hilariously terrible.

A friend of mine was once stuck in traffic in a rental car on the highway back from Seattle. Perhaps it was the combination of lurching forward, gas fumes from the idling cars or the huge sandwich she’d just eaten, but she began to feel distinctly unwell. After trying to keep it together, she barfed and peed her pants at the same time. In a rental car! So, yes, a full-on horror show.

But when she told me the story, we laughed so hard, there was imminent threat of more peeing of the pants. The most terrible experiences can sometimes make for the best stories. So, you can’t find a bathroom and you pee your pants. Well, so what! Waddle home as best you can. The next time something embarrassing happens, squirrel it away to make for a later yarn session. At the heart of the human condition is a laughable amount of ridiculousness and that’s actually kind of comforting.

The dentist

It’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be.

How to keep on keeping on

Turns out if you face all of your fears, one after the other, it doesn’t necessarily make the terror go away, but it does blunt it a little bit. Other strategies such as perspective, preparation, useful rage and not taking your ridiculous self so seriously are also helpful. We’re all just a few steps away from peeing our pants and dying.

Which brings me to the remainder of that damn Dune quote: “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

There’s always something bigger and badder to offset smaller fears. That’s life and death: accept it and keep on trucking. Wine also helps.